Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [225]
“We arrived in the morning at Cobb, and the sun was shining and there was Ireland before us. I’ve never experienced so deep a thrill. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. This is where my grandparents had come from—this was my real homeland and the sensation was almost overpowering in its intensity. I was up on the bridge with Paddy, the old Irish pilot, and I guess he knew what was going on in my heart, because he smiled at me. ‘God bless you, lad,’ he said, ‘the door latch is always out.’ Some day, I’m going to Ireland and I’m going to take Pat O’Brien with me. What a time Pat would have over there.”
The return trip was nasty in comparison to the going—fog, rain, and rough seas, and the ship pitched furiously. Tracy was planning to meet up with Lincoln Cromwell in New York, as he was anxious for the young man to take his second year of internship in Europe. He was offering, in fact, to pay travel expenses for Cromwell and his new wife to make an investigatory trip over the summer. Upon docking, however, he was advised that his mother had suffered a stroke in Los Angeles, and he and Louise left for Chicago within hours. They were relieved to find Carrie doing “pretty well” in California and that her doctors expected her to make a complete recovery.
In Los Angeles he sat for a long interview with Ed Sullivan and seemed genuinely altered by the experience of visiting Europe. It appeared that everyone he encountered in England and France had seen Boys Town, and that the picture struck an undeniable chord with every segment of the audience.
After nearly a decade in Hollywood, Tracy had come to regard the broad canvas of the screen as a public trust, a place where the great social issues of the day could be defined and portrayed and where the spiritual values of hope and goodwill could be reinforced. The best characters, he said, gave voice to the ideals of the common man and sent people home “feeling that there was dignity to life and to living, and some point to muddling along.” He couldn’t help but note that after five years of indifferent pictures at Fox—virtually none of which had a transformative effect on an audience—he had risen to the very pinnacle of stardom on a core group of productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—Fury, San Francisco, Captains Courageous, and Boys Town. “I’ll tell you what I’d love to play: Grapes of Wrath. That is a story that has tremendous social significance to it. It’s big, important. It has guts. I wish that Darryl Zanuck could borrow me from Metro and Jim Cagney from Warners for that one. I promise you that we’d play the hell out of it, or at least die in the attempt.”
He went on to tell Sullivan that he thought Robert Morley’s rangy performance in Oscar Wilde “great”—it was the one Broadway play he had permitted himself—but he found the material itself repulsive, dealing as it did with the historic trial for pederasty (“gross indecency”) that led to Wilde’s undoing. “I left the theater feeling ashamed to have seen such a play. I felt sort of unclean, because to a normal person the topic is almost obscene. The play itself obscured the performance. After all, experienced actors shouldn’t have to prove they can give great performances. That should be taken for granted. The most important thing is for the play itself to have a buoyant effect on the audience.”
While Tracy refused to take the Academy Award seriously as a symbol of artistic merit, it did bolster his standing within the industry and underscore his growing popularity with the moviegoing public. Progressively more space was